City of London Police are a very strange entity, since the Corporation of London isn't really a democratic body, and their police force should be viewed as serving the interests of their corporate masters, rather than the people at large. As such, I wouldn't obey any instruction from them without a court order.

I should like to point out that I, a registered voter and taxpayer, have never been asked whether I want my taxes spent

IO take it you don't really know much about the City of London, then. Since I now walk through it daily I thought I'd do a bit of reading. It is a very, very strange place (and the police are an arm of it). To refer to it as "well dodgy" is a massive understatement.

So firstly, it's older than the England you know: the administrative system (known as the Corporation of London) predates the Normal conquest of 1066, though they had their charter re issued after since it was lost at some point. The Corporation of London is some weird hybrid between a local council, an ancient government, a company and a secret society.

This means it's embedded in the legal system in weird and woderful ways. For example, they have a representative in the house of commons (not an MP) to make sure that parliament is acting in their interests. Also, the registered voters not only include humans, but businesses too and in proportion to the number of employees within the city. This means that bisuness vastly out vote the local residents. And for part of this you're only eligible to run for office if you've already been given the freedom of the city, making it a massively closed system.

The dodgyness continues. The manifestation of this in the dody dealings of the City of London police is only the tiniest tip of a very large iceberg. About the best thing you can say about the City of London police is they sometimes wear those rather anachronistic Policeman's capes which look kinda cool.

In case anyone reading this believes this ios hyperbole or some left wing rant, it is literally true. The companies in the City get to vote in proportion to the number of employees and so vastly out vote the citizens.

Granted, this whack-a-mole game with individual torrent sites makes for a fun show sometimes. But I find it embarrassing that the online community has to work around these issues time after time, and that some good people get caught up in legal battles.

Are there any good alternatives to bittorrent for private, anonymous file search and exchange? I heard about several "darknet" projects, but they never seem to gain traction for some reason. Given a huge number of hobbyist hackers who support free exchange of information, I am surprised.

Is there a fundamental reason why we cannot have free, anonymous file exchange? Or is everyone just happy with the status quo?

Let's face it: that's at least a really big factor. But as for darknets not gaining traction, that's purely a matter of point of view. I'm on some very successful and useful darknets. I just can't trust any of them very much (see below).

Another thing going on, is that people aren't very good at learning from history and building upon existing infrastructures. PGP has incredible potential as a decentralized authentication system, and once you have one of those, you can have consensuses that are highly resistant to interference (i.e. censorship). The blockchain used by Bitcoin has some really interesting applications here as well, but people mostly just want to use it as money.

Also, I think that among most people who think about this stuff, anonymous communication isn't a high priority. There aren't many situations where anonymity is particularly useful, and then when you start thinking about security issues (e.g. preventing monitoring, MitM, sabotage, DoS via noise/spam, etc) it works against you. It's a lot easier to solve problems when you throw out the probably-worthless-anyway anonymity requirement.

Indeed, usually when I see something announced that is "anonymous," the first thing that pops into my head, is that the system can likely be spied upon and sabotaged fairly easily. The burden of proof is on the presenter, to show how the system can even possibly not be hopelessly broken. So far, no one has done that. And we have TOR's utterly complete failure as an example of what happens when you just gloss over this elephant.